Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS July 1 2011 from Robert Wells's review of Complete Poetry, Translations, and Selected Prose , by Bernard Spencer, edited by Peter Robinson: In his story ["Baa, Baa, Black Sheep"] Kipling links Punch's loss with a precocious compensatory passion for language. Spencer remarks on a similar preoccupation in himself: "I used to pray that I should be a traveller abroad when I grew up, just as I used to pray that I should be a poet". For him the two wishes are inseparable, committing him to a quest for a reality to replace the one taken from him. "The poet's immoderate, promiscuous love" has its origin in an immense deprivation. * Spencer died in an accident at the age of fifty-three. The accident was unforeseeable, yet in the later poems there are many such presentiments that a denouement was near. Spencer vanished one evening from the clinic in Vienna to which, in a state of delirium, he had been admitted after the sudden worsening of an...

The New Yorker , December 22 & 29, 2008 Peter Schjeldahl writes on the Dumas exhibition at the MoMA: There is a heaviness to the paintings of the South African-born, Dutch-based artist Marlene Dumas, as if they might fall off the wall and break the floor. And yet they are thinly brushed, for the most part, on ordinary canvases. There's a flypaper stickiness about them, too, though their usual surface is matte and dry. The impressions are emotional. * Her art rarely conveys feeling so much as excites it and then absorbs it, to the benefit of the work's authority. She doesn't give; she takes. * [Of "Stern" (2004), based on Gerhard Richter's "October 18, 1977" (1988), itself in turn based on photographs of the Baader-Meinhof militants] she drags the drama of a particularly haunting tragedy back to the secondhandedness of the photograph from the thirdhandedness of Richter's painting. By this and analogous uses of imagination, Dumas suggests, a li...

The New Yorker , October 15, 2007 Yes, yes, it's a really old number. Reading Peter Schjeldahl's review of Richard Prince at the Guggenheim reminds me of my own reaction to the retrospective of this American appropriations artist. Of Prince's rephotograph of a Garry Gross photograph, of a naked Brooke Shields, aged ten, her prepubescent body oiled and face given womanly make-up, Schjeldahl writes: The Guggenheim's chief curator, Nancy Spector--who, working closely with the artist, has installed the show with excellent rhythm and clarity--hastens, in an essay in the catalogue, to defend the work as social criticism, "a portrait of desperation" exposing the American pursuit of fame at any cost. But she thereby fails to credit (if that's the word) Prince's omnivorous connoisseurship of kink, as in paintings (which have been selling for millions at aunctions) from covers of semi-smutty romance novels featuring nurses. He doesn't diagnose decadence. He...

The New Yorker, October 2008 from Claudia Roth Pierpont's essay "Method Man" on Marlon Brando: [Of "A Streetcar Named Desire"] Without changing a word, the actor seemed to have expanded the role and turned Williams's original meaning upside down. Jessica Tandy, the British actress who played Blanche, was furious that the audience laughed along with Stanley's jokes at her expense--as though he were a regular guy putting an uppity woman in her place--and stunned that it openly extended its sympathies more to the executioner than his victim. The reason was not just Brando's youth: it was the comic innocence that fuelled the gibes, the baffled tenderness beneath the toughness. The face above the heavily muscled body was angelic; the pain he showed when he broke down and wailed for his wife was searing, elemental. And his intensity was almost unbearable. One critic wrote that "Brando seems always on the verge of tearing down the proscenium with his b...

from Alex Ross's article "Song of the Earth" on composer John Luther Adams: "My music is going inexorably from being about place to becoming place," Adams said of his installation. I have a vivid memory of flying out of Alaska early one morning on my way to Oberlin, where I ataught for a couple of fall semesters. It was aglorious early-fall day. Winter was coming in. I love winter, and I didn't want to go. As we crested the central peaks of the Alaska Range, I looked down at Mt. Hayes, and all at once I was overcome by the intense love that I have for this place--an almost erotic feeling about those mountains. Over the next fifteen minutes, I found myself furiously sketching, and when I came up for air I realized, There is is. I knew that I wanted to hear the unheard, that i wanted to somehow transpose the music that is just beyong the reach of our ears into audible vibrations. I knew that it had to be its own space. And I knew that it had to be real--that ...